“I can’t have a slumlord as a brother,” I said, frowning.
“Thank you!” Finn threw up his hands. “Someone get this man a drink.”
“This is a nondrinking lunch,” Spencer reminded everyone.
“Really?” Aaron said dryly. “Because I saw you pouring a miniature bottle of something into your mocktail.”
“Now who’s the snitch?”
I smirked.
“This is the building I’m looking at; it’s not on the market yet,” Connor told me, pulling up the address on his phone. “I get first dibs. I’m coming in with an all-cash offer, me and one of the Svenssons. He lives down the hall from me at Harvard.”
Graham passed me the phone, and I frowned as I read the address.
“You can’t buy this,” I stated.
“You’ve been outvoted.” Finn elbowed Connor.
“Give me the contact for the seller,” I ordered.
Connor looked to Aaron. “He’s going to buy the building himself.”
Aaron shrugged.
“Now,” I said, baring my teeth at Connor. “That’s Lexi’s apartment building, and I will be purchasing it.”
65
LEXI
“Well, it happened,” McKenna said when I answered the phone.
“What happened?” I asked sleepily. I flopped over on the mound of stuffed animals.
Gizzy, lounging at the foot of my bed, hissed softly.
“Oh, I’m sorry, did I wake you up?” McKenna asked.
“I needed to get up,” I said with a sigh. From the kitchen, I could hear my mom singing beautifully as she made lunch.
I’d been sleeping later and later over the past few weeks, staying up late into the night, anxiously applying for jobs and cyberstalking Grayson. Unfortunately, I hadn’t gotten a response from any of the jobs I had applied for. My parents had even called some of their old contacts at Disney to see if there were any job openings.
“Someone bought the building,” McKenna said.
“Oh no.” I hung my head. I had tried, in between sobbing fits and eating homemade orange sorbet, to stop the destruction of the building. But the bankruptcy proceedings had begun, and everyone at the city I talked to said it was hopeless unless I wanted to buy the building myself.
“Who bought it?”
“Not sure.” I could hear her shrug. “Some investment firm.” In the background was the murmur of the Richmond Electric office.
“McKenna, can we go over the schedule when you’re—oh, my apologies. You’re on the phone.”
“One minute, Mr. Richmond,” she said.
“You have to go,” I said dejectedly and hung up.
Tell Grayson I said fuck you.
